There was much excitement as the Eastern Caribbean Telecommunications Authority (ECTEL) virtually launched its Electronic Communications (EC) Bill Education and Public Awareness Campaign on Thursday, January 27. In a release, ECTEL said the participants who joined via Zoom and Facebook were enlightened about the EC Bill and its multitude of benefits to consumers in our five member states of the Commonwealth of Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

In his opening remarks delivered under the theme Bridging the Broadband Usage Gap, senior minister and Minister for Infrastructure, Ports, Transport, Physical Development and Urban Renewal (Saint Lucia) and Chairman of ECTEL’s Council of Ministers, Stephenson King said: “Quality of service on both fixed and mobile broadband networks has been a challenge across the ECTEL Member States. Under the new regulatory framework, ECTEL will propose updated Quality of Service Regulations.”

He added that, “these will replace outdated regulations which are no longer fit for purpose and do not allow the regulator to acquire useful information from service providers to address the numerous complaints from consumers. Updated regulation will allow for the use of new tools for monitoring and measuring the quality of service offered by providers, and importantly, the quality of customer experiences when using broadband and other electronic communications services.”

And the Chairman of the Board of Directors, Duane Noel (Grenada), spoke about the role of the EC Bill in promoting a robust broadband supply chain in support of the elimination of the broadband usage gap in the Member States.

Noel said: “The absence of clear infrastructure sharing regulations to allow other operators access to potential bottleneck infrastructure, can frustrate efforts to deliver competitively priced broadband services to consumers.”

He went on to note that the EC Bill encourages and supports investment in robust infrastructure by all service providers and that this is essential to ensure network resilience and redundancy in the electronic communications sector.

The brief, interactive event also involved a Q&A session as well as two quizzes to test participants’ knowledge of the EC Bill and ECTEL’s work. The winners of the quiz are Juronel K.R. Smalling and . Bennette Thomas.

If you missed the launch of the EC Bill Education and Public Awareness Campaign, you may watch it at: https://youtu.be/XC5LbVDGqIY.